Enhancing Communications and Cutting Costs — Panopto at City & Guilds

City and Guilds is a world leading vocational education organisation. They develop vocational qualifications across a variety of sectors to help meet the needs of today’s workplace, and enable individuals to develop their talents and abilities for future career progression. Their qualifications are delivered in more than 10,000 training centres across the world and are widely recognised and respected by employers.

From initially using the system to capture training sessions, they are now identifying many new uses for Panopto – from recording videos by internal subject matter experts to helping them connect with their customers more effectively. This is ultimately saving the company both time and money.

The Challenge

As a leading provider of vocational qualifications, City and Guilds has a hugely diverse product portfolio, offering around 500 qualifications through their various departments – both domestically and internationally. The sheer breadth of their offering coupled with their dispersed office locations was presenting them with a number of challenges which they were keen to address. For instance, with disparate offices spread over a wide geographic area, it was sometimes difficult to ensure a consistent approach to the training and development of their staff. In addition, with such a large range of courses, guaranteeing that new members of staff were able to talk about the whole product portfolio knowledgeably to prospective customers was proving hard.

As a consequence, City and Guilds wanted to find a digitally-based solution that would help them deal with these training and communications issues. Having heard about Panopto’s video management platform, the organisation began to explore the possibilities the system could offer them.

Getting Started with Panopto

Training and development staff became the first people at City and Guilds to start using the system. There were two main initial uses – the first to record material for internal development and the second to use video as part of the induction process which involved filming a welcome message from the CEO to be sent to all new starters.

However, Chris Newsome – the learning and development consultant responsible for ensuring the successful uptake of the system – was keen that Panopto did not become associated with just one department. As he reflects: “We could see right from the start that there were applications for the Panopto system pretty much across the board. It had the potential to work really well across different departments and we were eager to roll the system out across the organisation as quickly as possible.”

To help spread the word about Panopto, information was posted on the City and Guilds intranet and Q&A sessions were held. Chris also worked with Panopto staff to organise a ‘Brown Bag Lunch’, which consisted of a presentation to outline the benefits of the solution and a chance for staff across the business to pose their questions directly to Panopto staff. This has been backed-up with more one-to-one meetings to go into the system in more detail.

As Chris explains: “Some people have been skeptical that it will be complicated to use. Once you take the chance to sit down with them and explain that all they have to do is press the record button, it opens another new world really. When they find it’s so easy to use they begin to identify ways it can help them in their day-to-day work. Once they’ve used it a couple of times, we find people coming back to ask if they can use it in this way or in that way – they become as interested to explore the system as we are.”

Emerging Uses for Panopto

As well as using Panopto to improve the training and development of their staff, Chris saw potential for the system to be a highly effective external communications tool as well as an internal one. Consequently, they have used Panopto for customer-facing recordings to great effect. For instance, when they have a new business manager who is fairly new to the product portfolio going to visit customers, this staff member is now supported by videos from subject-matter experts to help supplement their more limited knowledge of the full range of City and Guilds qualifications.

As Chris puts it: “I think the more and more we understand about the product, the more and more uses we’ll find for it. The feedback we’ve had from our staff is that it’s a great solution and they just need to take time to go back into the business and consider how it can help them refine and enhance their existing practices.”

The Results

Although City and Guilds is in the early stages of its use of Panopto, Chris and his team are already seeing a tangible return on their investment. In the past they’ve had to travel both internationally and regionally to do training and presentations, so have seen immediate savings on travel and accommodation costs. They can measure the benefits of the system in terms of hours of time saved as well as direct costs and say that Panopto has helped in each of these areas.

As they begin to explore the analytics that underpin the system, this will help further identify the results that Panopto is enabling them to achieve.